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Category: The war that will not end in our lifetimes

US Secretary of State told a group of journalists when the United States invaded Iraq, “this will be a war that will not end in your lifetimes.” The vision of the project for the New American Century which backed George W Bush’s bid for presidency, is that the United States will control the world economy, by controlling the world’s oil supplies. The backing of independence movements in Georgia and Chechnya has deprived Russia of the gateway to Middle Eastern oil, and prevented it building a planned pipeline to China. Combined with manouvers in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel, it is clear that this plan is being put into effect. The news stories in this category track the progress of this project and the impact it is having on the world economy and hence, your daily life.

  • How Israel has turned war into economic oil

    Political chaos means Israel is booming like it’s 1999 – and the boom is in defence exports field-tested on Palestinians

    By Naomi Klein

    09/16/07 "The Guardian" — — Gaza in the hands of Hamas, with masked militants sitting in the president’s chair; the West Bank on the edge; Israeli army camps hastily assembled in the Golan Heights; a spy satellite over Iran and Syria; war with Hizbullah a hair trigger away; a scandal-plagued political class facing a total loss of public faith. At a glance, things aren’t going well for Israel. But here’s a puzzle: why, in the midst of such chaos and carnage, is the Israeli economy booming like it’s 1999, with a roaring stock market and growth rates nearing China’s?

    Thomas Friedman recently offered his theory in the New York Times. Israel "nurtures and rewards individual imagination", and so its people are constantly spawning ingenious hi-tech start-ups, no matter what messes their politicians are making. After perusing class projects by students in engineering and computer science at Ben-Gurion University, Friedman made one of his famous fake-sense pronouncements. Israel "had discovered oil". This oil, apparently, is located in the minds of Israel’s "young innovators and venture capitalists", who are too busy making megadeals with Google to be held back by politics.

    Here’s another theory. Israel’s economy isn’t booming despite the political chaos that devours the headlines but because of it. This phase of development dates back to the mid-90s, when the country was in the vanguard of the information revolution – the most tech-dependent economy in the world. After the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, Israel’s economy was devastated, facing its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and suddenly new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack, and extract confessions from closed-mouthed prisoners.

    Within three years, large parts of Israel’s tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms, Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country’s most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel’s status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of 24-hour-a-day showroom, a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.

    Discussions of Israel’s military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country – US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank, and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel’s huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2bn in "defence" products to the United States – up dramatically from $270m in 1999. In 2006, Israel exported $3.4bn in defence products – well over a billion more than it received in American military aid. That makes Israel the fourth largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

    Much of this growth has been in the so-called homeland security sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2bn, an increase of 20%. The key products and services are hi-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems – precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

    And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn’t threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror".

    It’s no coincidence that the class projects at Ben-Gurion that so impressed Friedman have names like Innovative Covariance Matrix for Point Target Detection in Hyperspectral Images, and Algorithms for Obstacle Detection and Avoidance. Thirty homeland security companies have been launched in Israel during the past six months alone, thanks in large part to lavish government subsidies that have transformed the Israeli army and the country’s universities into incubators for security and weapons start-ups – something to keep in mind in the debates about the academic boycott.

    Next week, the most established of these companies will travel to Europe for the Paris Air Show, the arms industry’s equivalent of Fashion Week. One of the Israeli companies exhibiting is Suspect Detection Systems (SDS), which will be showcasing its Cogito1002, a white, sci-fi-looking security kiosk that asks air travellers to answer a series of computer-generated questions, tailored to their country of origin, while they hold their hand on a "biofeedback" sensor. The device reads the body’s reactions to the questions, and certain responses flag the passenger as "suspect".

    Like hundreds of other Israeli security start-ups, SDS boasts that it was founded by veterans of Israel’s secret police and that its products were road-tested on Palestinians. Not only has the company tried out the biofeedback terminals at a West Bank checkpoint, it claims the "concept is supported and enhanced by knowledge acquired and assimilated from the analysis of thousands of case studies related to suicide bombers in Israel".

    Another star of the Paris Air Show will be Israeli defence giant Elbit, which plans to showcase its Hermes 450 and 900 unmanned air vehicles. As recently as last month, according to press reports, Israel used the drones on bombing missions in Gaza. Once tested in the territories, they are exported abroad: the Hermes has already been used at the Arizona-Mexico border; Cogito1002 terminals are being auditioned at an unnamed American airport; and Elbit – also one of the companies behind Israel’s "security barrier" – has set up a deal with Boeing to construct the Department of Homeland Security’s $2.5bn "virtual" border fence around the US.

    Since Israel began its policy of sealing off the occupied territories with checkpoints and walls, human rights activists have often compared Gaza and the West Bank to open-air prisons. But in researching the explosion of Israel’s homeland security sector, a topic explored in greater detail in my forthcoming book, it strikes me that they are something else too: laboratories where the terrifying tools of our security states are being field-tested. Palestinians – whether living in the West Bank or what the Israeli politicians are already calling Hamastan – are no longer just targets. They are guinea pigs.

    So in a way Friedman is right, Israel has struck oil. But the oil isn’t the imagination of its techie entrepreneurs. The oil is the war on terror, the state of constant fear that creates a bottomless global demand for devices that watch, listen, contain and target "suspects". And fear, it turns out, is the ultimate renewable resource.

    Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, will be published later this year by Picador; a version of this article appears in the Nation, www.thenation.com and www.nologo.org

    More about academic boycott of Israel:

    http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7640

    http://www.pacbi.org/

    http://www.pacbi.org/boycott_news_more.php?id=588_0_1_0_C  

  • Robots carry machine guns in Iraq

    So the radio-controlled robots were retooled, for greater safety.   In the past, weak signals would keep the robots from getting orders for as much as eight seconds — a significant lag during combat.  Now, the SWORDS won’t act on a command, unless it’s received right away.  A three-part arming process — with both physical and electronic safeties — is required before firing.   Most importantly, the machines now come with kill switches, in case there’s any odd behavior.  "So now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," Zecca says.

    As initially reported in National Defense magazine, only three of the robots are currently in Iraq.  Zecca says he’s ready to send more, "but we don’t have the money.  It’s not a priority for the Army, yet."  He believes that’ll change, once the robots begin getting into firefights.

  • A Primer on Israeli Doublespeak

    July 14 / 15, 2007

    Language as an Instrument of Crime

    By RANNIE AMIRI

    It is indeed a great irony that George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, the same year Israel was created. For this nation, above all others, has proven itself most adept in the use and promulgation of doublespeak.

    Defined by Webster’s Dictionary as "evasive, ambiguous, high-flown language intended to deceive or confuse," Israeli governments have always relied on it to justify the expansionist nature of their state, excuse the confiscation of land and minimize the extent to which its inhabitants have been mistreated or abused.

    A few examples:

    The Security Fence

    The monstrosity which Israel is constructing along the entire length of the West Bank is no more for security than it is a fence. The barrier, started in 2003 and now more than half complete, is scheduled to run over 450 miles and reach a height of 25 feet ­ four times longer than and twice as high as the former Berlin Wall. Composed of concrete and electrified wire, surrounded by trenches and mounted with strategically positioned sniper towers, calling it a "fence" is more than farcical.

    Israel's security fenceIn 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled construction of the barrier illegal (a verdict, of course, ignored). Within the last week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs issued a report indicating that it will "restrict access to workplaces, health, education, and to places of worship." In addition, it fully recognized that Arab-majority East Jerusalem will be severed from the West Bank by its route. In another area, 50,000 Palestinians would be completely isolated and restricted to the zone between it and Israel resulting in their inability "to access critical services such as schools, clinics and shops in either Israel or the West Bank without special permits."

    More telling is where the barrier is being built. According to the UN report, 80% of it on West Bank land.

    The "security fence" is thus an offensive structure rather than the defensive one it purports to be. It is just one illustration of how Israel attempts to obfuscate a reality ­ in this case, a very expensive land grab – through use of language.

    Moderate Physical Pressure and Work Accidents

    Israel was at one time the only country to officially sanction the use of torture, euphemistically referred to as "moderate physical pressure." Lea Tsemel, a defense lawyer and founder of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) remarked, "Israel is the only Western country that openly uses torture. This is not some brute in the secret services beating up a prisoner. It’s done in the open. There is quiet legitimation by a high-ranking commission and government ministers" (New York Times, May 8, 1997).

    The Sunday Times had already arrived at the same conclusion in June 1977: "Torture of Arab prisoners is so widespread and systematic that it cannot be dismissed as ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders. It appears to be sanctioned as deliberate policy."

    Whenever a detainee died under torture, it was dismissed as an unfortunate "work accident." It took a ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999 to ban the practice. Unfortunately they have now reversed themselves. A judgment issued this past June allows Shin Bet to use methods regarded by PCATI as torture when in a "ticking bomb" situation. With likely wide interpretation of this circumstance, it appears a green light has just been issued to reinstate the practice.

    The Absent Present

    This bizarre term was used describe those Palestinians who were not driven out of Palestine in 1948, but remained within what was to later become Israel. If they temporarily left their homes or were away from their land during the war, they were prevented from reclaiming it. Confiscation of the property of the "absent present" was then permitted (Haaretz, January 14, 1955).

    The Abandoned Areas

    "We take the land first and the law comes after."

    – Yehoshafat Palmon, Arab Affairs advisor to the mayor of Jerusalem (Guardian, April 26, 1972).

    Whether to assuage the conscience of emigrating Jews or not, the Zionists who founded Israel passed a series of discriminatory laws with harmless and protective sounding titles explicitly for the purpose of expropriating inhabited Palestinian land. In some instances, these laws were made retroactive.

    They carried such names as the Emergency Defense Regulations, the Abandoned Areas Ordinance, the Emergency Articles for the Exploitation of Uncultivated Lands, and as described above, the Absentee Property Law.

    These laws all attempted to reinforce the myth peddled by Zionists depicting Palestine as "a land without a people." Nonetheless, they were aptly described by the Jewish writer Moshe Keren as "wholesale robbery with a legal coating."

    Definition of Israeli doublespeak: the use of language to hide crimes of the state.

    It would surely make Big Brother proud.

    Rannie Amiri is an independent commentator on issues dealing with the Arab and Islamic worlds. He may be reached at: rbamiri@yahoo.com.

    Reference

    1. Zayid, Ismail. Zionism: The Myth and the Reality. American Trust Publications, Indianapolis, 1980.

  • Why Iraq’s new oil law won’t last

    Because of sabotage by insurgents, Iraqi oil production has been running at less than 2 million barrels per day, down from 2.8 million barrels before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, says Mr. Zainy, now with the Global Center for Energy Studies in London.

    To Alhajji, the "rush" to approve the draft law reflects the need of the Iraqi government and the Bush administration to show some success – "even if it is as cosmetic as the new oil law."

    Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador in Iraq, stated the draft was the "first time since 2003 that all major Iraqi communities have come together on a defining piece of legislation."

    Iraq’s government hopes the nation’s 275-member parliament will approve the draft before the end of May.

    The legislation will be extremely controversial. Opposition is expected from the powerful Oil Workers Union of Basra. It staged strikes in 2005 objecting to America’s plan to privatize Iraq’s oil industry. A reviving Communist Party will oppose it. Much of the Iraqi press also objects to aspects of the law.

    One sensitive provision allows "production sharing agreements" (PSAs) with foreign oil firms. In theory, Iraq would retain ownership and ultimate control of the oil in such a deal. A PSA would merely grant the firm or consortium the right to explore, develop, and sell the oil, while getting a share of the oil extracted. History, however, is full of "unequal" PSAs highly favorable to oil companies and less favorable to oil nations.

    Zainy says that details of an oil contract are more important than whether it is called a PSA, a "production and development contract," or a service contract. He fears "corruption, presently rampant in Iraq" could affect contracts, wasting much of the nation’s main resource.

    During the 20th century, oil became the fulcrum of politics in the Middle East, with countries nationalizing their oil resources and winning better oil deals. The draft law "reverses everything that has happened in the Middle East since 1901," charges Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University in New York. Implying that American occupiers have had much influence on the measure, Mr. Khalidi asks: "Does [Vice President] Cheney think he can stand against history?"

    Khalidi’s latest book, "Resurrecting Empire," spells out the history of foreign exploitation of Iraqi oil, noting that resentment over "insufficient benefits" to Iraqis led to the popularity of the Baath government and nationalization of the oil industry in 1975.

    Khalidi doubts the draft law will pass parliament. "It is so manifestly against the interests of Iraq," he says. If it does, though, he doesn’t expect the law to last. Presumably, an Iraq no longer occupied would seek better terms for any deal reached under the proposed law.

    Alhajji notes that contracts signed "under duress" are not legally binding. After Iran nationalized its oil industry in the 1950s, British lawyers for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) contested the action in the International Court in the Hague and lost, despite Britain’s superpower status then.

    In the future, Iraqi lawyers could similarly argue that any oil deal signed while Iraq was occupied was done under duress and thus was invalid.

    After reading the draft law in Arabic last week, Alhajji says, "It is so broad and loose, it has no significance." Often, he says, nationalism in oil-rich nations rises during and after occupation by foreigners. That "will cause problems."

  • US Builds Nazi ghettos in Iraq

    Thus the Pentagon gives the lie to its own lie that it was peddling a week ago. No doubt we will soon find that this figure of 10 open-air prisons is itself a lie, and that the Bushists are actually constructing up to 30 such neighborhood concentration camps, as called for in the plans that Fisk uncovered.

    What will life be like in these "gated communities," as the Pentagon, with its customary dry wit, calls the ghettos? Residents will be fingerprinted and submitted to "biometric scanning" as the basis for identity papers which they will be forced to display to the armed guards stationed at the few exit points from the ghetto. In some of the ghettos, there are proposals being considered to force residents to wear "identification badges." No word yet on whether these insignia will be in the form of, say, a yellow crescent, or perhaps some further discernment to separate Sunni from Shiite in the great ethnic cleansing and enclosing that Bush has embarked upon in Baghdad.

    The Post story is breathtaking in the open acceptance of this brutal and highly illegal new plan — not only on the part of U.S. military officers, but also by the paper itself, which simply adopts the Pentagon’s Orwellian tag of "gated communities" and uses it throughout the piece, without quotes. The phrase is used over and over, repeatedly invoking the peaceful image of a prosperous American suburb, with its wide lawns, well-tended houses and gently rolling streets nestled safely and securely behind tasteful brick walls. This alternate reality — or surreality, rather — has already infected the troops being ordered to carry out this war crime: "They’ve been doing it in Florida, and the old people seem to like it," joked the platoon’s leader, Sgt. 1st Class Charles Schmitt, 37.

    What yoks! Schmitt’s remark came while his men were working — "under cover of darkness" — to place six-foot slabs of heavy concrete around the Ghazaliyah district. "Tanks and Humvees provided security for the cranes and forklifts being used to build what would be the neighborhood’s lone civilian checkpoint," says the Post’s embedded report. Yes, it’s just like Miami Beach, all right — a place where they might still have some memories of a previous application of this "counterinsurgency" tactic by a foreign occupation power. (See picture at right.)

    The story is also remarkable for the disturbing degree of infantilization it reveals among the soldiers and officers taking part in the imprisoning of Baghdad. Here’s 1st Lt. Sean Henley’s analysis of the situation in Ghazaliyah, according to the Post: "If we keep the bad guys out, then we win." Here’s Sgt. 1st Class Tom Revette’s take on how the "surge" has reduced the number of civilian corpses found on Ghazaliyah’s streets every morning. Instead of piles of bodies it’s "just onesies and twosies."

    Then we hear from Capt. Darren Fowler, who is eager to begin the forced biometric scanning of the area’s residents, not only to catch Henley’s "bad guys," but also to build up a neighborhood census — "something counterinsurgency experts say is an essential step in tracking population movements," the Post dutifully reminds us. For as we all know, "tracking population movements" is an essential part of any "liberation." How on earth can you liberate someone if you don’t have their biodata compiled and a record of their movements? What’s more, the intrusive physical cataloging of the liberated Iraqis "will also let soldiers compare the fingerprints of people who enter with fingerprints collected during operations," we’re told.

    And this will be extra neat, says Fowler, because "we can pull fingerprints off all the bad stuff they handle and run it through the database. The soldiers’ favorite show to watch is CSI. We actually get some techniques from them."

    So there you have it. While picking up onesies and twosies of dead bodies from the streets every morning, the guardians of the ghetto can herd residents through a single checkpoint, make sure they have the right eyes assigned to them by the database and are not "bad guys" doing "bad stuff," then maybe stick a Q-tip in their mouths for a DNA swab or spray them with that stuff that shows blood under blacklight, just like they do on that made-up show on TV where glamorous gals and dudical dudes dig around in corpses, cracking wise and flashing cleavage between commercials for luxury cars and hemorrhoid cream.

    Of course, that’s about the same level of insight and sophistication that the Post’s own war cheerleader Fred Hiatt brings to his dry heavings on the editorial page, so it’s not surprising to see it highlighted in the story. No doubt there are many, many American soldiers in Iraq who realize they are not playing tiddlywinks in a TV show, but none of these are quoted by the Post. Instead, the only dissenting voice is given to an Iraqi soldier, Maj. Hathem Faek Salman, who receives Capt. Fowler’s good news about the ghetto with the surly ingratitude we’ve come to expect from these ignorant barbarians who don’t appreciate being liberated to death by good guys doing good stuff like they do on TV:

    "This is not a good plan," Salman, 40, had said before the meeting. "If my region were closed by these barriers, I would hate the army, because I would feel like I was in a big jail. . . . If you want to make the area secure and safe, it is not with barriers. We have to win the trust of the people."


    Oh come on, Major Salman! If you don’t like the show, just change the channel! Anyway, this plan is not about winning the trust of your people or providing them with security and stability, since it will obviously do none of those things. It’s about bringing the death count numbers down a little bit in order to gull the rubes back home and keep the war — and the war profiteering — going on a bit longer.

    *

    UPDATE:  The lies surrounding the Bush ghetto plan for Baghdad are flying fast and furious, careening into each other as they fly around the media echo chamber. This morning, the Washington Post, in the story referenced above, reported the forthright statment by Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell — deputy commander of American forces in Baghdad — that "at least 10 Baghdad neighborhoods are slated to become or already are gated communities." The story, by Karin Brulliard — who was obviously embedded with U.S. forces and reported only what she saw and heard from American officials or in their company at American-led meetings — also gave copious details about the methods to be used in dividing and controlling the population of Baghdad, and reported, as noted above, that the ghetto-building plan was "part of the two-month-old U.S. and Iraqi counterinsurgency plan to calm sectarian strife."

    Now, about eight hours or so after the WP story appeared, we have the New York Times relaying some panicky PR backpedaling from Bush brass spokesman Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, a well-pedigreed mouthpiece who spent some time in the first Bush White House after stints in the magnificent feat of arms that was the Conquest of Panama and the free-range turkey shoot of the first Gulf War. Caldwell issued a written statement denying that the U.S. military has "a new strategy of building walls or creating ‘gated communities,’" reported the Times (which had the good sense to use quotes around the morally hideous "gated communities" term, and mentioned it only once in the story).

    The hook of the story is the announcement by Bush’s satrap in the Babylonian colony, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, that goodness gracious granny me, the United States will certainly not build a "gated community" in Adhamiya, if Prime MinisterMaliki does not wish it to. This followed mass protests across the political, sectarian and ethnic spectrum in Iraq after the Adhamiya story got out. Yet, as the Post reported earlier, the building of ghettos goes on apace in the city, with Brig. Gen. Campbell noting that some neighborhoods "already are gated communities." (Emphasis added.)

    So which story that the Bush Pentagon has doled out in the last few days is closest to the truth? That the U.S. is not building walled-up ghettos in Baghdad? That the U.S. was building only one ghetto in Baghdad, in Adhamiya, but now promises, really and truly, to stop? That the U.S. is only building a handful of ghettos in Baghdad? That the U.S. is building or has already built at least 10 ghettos in Baghdad? That the U.S. is planning to build ghettos in up to 30 of the city’s districts, as the Independent reported last week? That the building of ghettos in Baghdad is not part of the surge strategy? That the building of ghettos is an integral part of the surge strategy?

    Perhaps this could be job one for Bush’s new "war czar" (if he ever finds someone willing to drink that poison chalice): sorting out the overproduction in the Pentagon propaganda department, and try to get them to stay with one bogus story for, say, at least a week before trotting out the next one.

  • Warning to Israel: a lesson from history

    In many ways, Israel is similar to the medieval Crusader states in the Holy Land. It has a different religion and different institutions from all of its neighbours. It looks west for its military and economic support and if it were not for that support would be unlikely to survive for long.

    Just as with those states, Israel is secure for as long as it can rely on its western lifeline. In the short term there is little danger of this being cut (the crusader states lasted about 200 years too). The US will probably be the dominant global power for the rest of my lifetime but it won’t be for ever. Think how one would have written about the long term future of the British Empire a hundred years ago. So, in the long term and in Israel’s own interests, it needs to come to an accomodation with its neighbours.

    by Comment No. 478925
    Posted March 16 11:15
    on comment is free  in response to Josh Freedman Berthoud’s (phew!) article Identity on parade:
    `In entering the Eurovision song contest, Israel is making a strong assertion about how it wishes to be viewed by the rest of the world.’